Star Wars, A Chanukah Story

Happy December! I hope you are all excited about our Chanukah season as it approaches in just a few weeks.  
Usually, when I write a newsletter article, I focus so much on Chanukah and the uniqueness of this Kislev holiday. This year I decided to talk about the importance of tradition, especially the unique traditions we Jews have made throughout our history in the month of December.
Every year, most of our non-Jewish friends ask us about this holiday that they can’t quite spell correctly called Chanukah. We tell them the story of the Maccabees and the oil in the temple.
We build up the holiday of eight days as some unique and special holiday season when in reality it is a nice, light holiday with no major religious significance outside of a time of thanksgiving that was supposed to be a time of fun and, more importantly, a recommitment to our faith and its unbreakable spirit in the tide of assimilation.
We Jews make Chanukah important because we needed an anchor during the non-Jewish time of December with a very major holiday on the horizon of Dec. 25. We Jews have set aside that day for very unique and yes, very Jewish traditions that seemed to have bled over into the non-Jewish world as the Chinese food restaurants are now filled on Christmas Eve and so are the movie theaters.
The December dilemma has been a major reality for the Jewish community since Christmas became a federal holiday shortly after the civil war in 1870. The Civil War intensified Christmas’ appeal.
Its sentimental celebration of family matched the yearnings of soldiers and those they left behind. Its message of peace and goodwill spoke to the most immediate prayers of all Americans. 
The hope was after a bloody civil war that maybe this holiday could become a new unifying factor in the country torn apart by civil war.  Jews felt left out so we began to build up the Chanukah holiday to similar levels of Christmas but we could never fully do it because Chanukah is not Christmas. 
Chanukah is joy and fun but not a serious religious contemplation like Yom Kippur is in our faith. So, we Jews did the next best thing, we added new traditions as we approached Dec. 25 and many households found a common distraction of finding something to do while the rest of the country was at home under their respective trees. 
So, it’s with this introduction that many American rabbis have been offered the question during this season by many Jews of “why Christmas?,” or more importantly “why not Christmas?,” and “should or should not Jews join in the celebration of this holiday on Dec. 25 that so many in America seem to relish?”
Some Jews turn the Christmas tree into what is jokingly called a Chanukah bush and place a dreidel or a Star of David on top of the tree and offer blue and white stockings for the kids. Some don’t even use that pretense and just put up the angel on top and make the place look like a virtual winter wonderland.
The answer to this question of why Jews should not celebrate Christmas is because Christmas is not our holiday and even though the great aesthetic appeal is there, we should not cheapen the beauty of this spiritual holiday by embracing the worst aspect of it which is the materialism that has accompanied Christmas with its spiritual celebration. That is why many Jews face the December dilemma with trepidation of how does one participate in a meaningful national experience while not embracing a holiday that is not ours.
I don’t have an easy answer here but what I have done that I learned from my parents that I now carry to my children is what many Jews on the holidays do, make their own tradition. Mine is dinner and a movie on Christmas Eve which I have done since my childhood.
My brother and I would so look forward to that late movie on Christmas Eve when the theater is almost empty and as you leave the streets are blank with lights flickering in an empty community while my Christian neighbors dream of the next day. I found this as meaningful as any religious experience that I could conjure up. 
Since my childhood, we would look forward to the holiday blockbusters coming out and decide which one we would see on the night of Dec. 24. This year, a new Star Wars movie is coming out and if there was ever a movie that conjures significance in my childhood it’s this franchise.
In 1977, my father took me and my brother out of school to see this new magical movie on opening week. It was an experience that I still hold dear as the years have progressed.
Sadly, my father and my brother are gone and I think of them every year as this season of movies and the holidays spring up. I have tried to give the love of this movie genre to my boys but with Minecraft and so much other media out there, the magic is just not the same, but tradition is tradition, and my sons, this holiday season, like the last two years, look forward to the moment when the new Star Wars movie comes out so I can take them out of school and see it with them like I did with my dad and brother so many years ago. 
I don’t know if they will ever love the movie like me, but that does not matter, they love that I love it and we share this together. That is how I have learned to face the December dilemma. 
ED. NOTE: Lipschultz is the former rabbi of Beth Judah Temple, Wildwood, and now serves at Tri City Jewish Center in Rock Island, Ill. He can be reached at dvjewish@rof.net.